Congratulations!!!! This is very exciting!

MEEHubs2026 registration and abstract submission is now online! 🚨🦠✨

Join us Aug 3 - 5, 2026 at one of the 7 hubs or online.

We are incredibly excited about our lineup of speakers, and hope that you submit an abstract to contribute too!

More information and registration links at:
meehubs.org

Excited to support #MEEHubs2026 as part of the local hub at ETH Zurich! This hybrid conference brings together microbial ecology and evolution researchers through global (free!) online access plus local in-person hubs, making science more inclusive and lower-carbon. August 3–5, 2026 🌍🦠

Your favorite hybrid microbial ecology and evolution conference is back! #meehubs2026. I am hosting a Hub for the US West in Irvine, CA and there will be travel fellowships for some students. Abstract deadline extended to April 26th!
meehubs2026.oa-event.com

The Social Lives of Viruses is coming to Vancouver, Canada, from 4th-8th August 2026!

This is a free meeting dedicated to all aspects of virus-virus interactions & evolution.

To apply: socialviruses.zoology.ubc.ca

@sociovirology.bsky.social #socialviruses #evosky #lovevirology #virosky

A snail shaped like long island

Deadline for symposium proposals at the @asn-amnat.bsky.social American Society of Naturalists stand alone meeting on long island due April 30 www.amnat.org/announcement... Plus check out this cool meeting logo of a snail shaped like long island

Curious about the origin of development during the transition to multicellularity?

A very belated preprint alert: bit.ly/4rr2mHU
Reproduction emerges from ecological interactions at the onset of multicellularity.

A short 🧵 with lots of videos...

Our study demonstrates a bridge between the inherently stochastic process of gut bacterial colonization in individual hosts and the widespread colonization that can emerge among hosts connected by dispersal.

And allowed for the recovery of bacterial density after antibiotics in complex self-assembled communities

Co-housed conditions also led to more similar microbiome communities across hosts (smaller distance between communities and to the centroid)

These colonization dynamics allow for bacteria to recover from antibiotic perturbations without any increases in resistance.

As well as the dynamics of a bacteria with a mutation affecting its motility (and therefore its expulsion rate).

This led us to the hypothesis that fish are acting as reservoirs for bacteria to grow and from there colonize other fish. Bryan Lynn, a postdoc in my lab, wrote a model with bacterial expulsion and growth inside the fish. This model recovers dynamics of bacteria in water and fish colonization.

Maria then looked at the dynamics of fish in the water and saw that bacteria rapidly decline in water but recover if fish are colonized.

Travis and his postdoc Maria Bañuelos had seen that colonization frequency is much higher in co-housed fish- AT THE SAME FISH AND BACTERIAL DENSITY. Co-housed fish shift the amount of bacteria that need to be in the water for almost complete colonization one order of magnitude.

For the second preprint, we collaborated with Travis Wiles to understand microbiome transmission and its role in community assembly using zebrafish. We found that dispersal dynamics can readily move gut colonization and assembly from a stochastic to fairly predictable www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

We found that the low variation in upper thermal limits might already be causing some maladaptation, with small thermal safety margins in hot environments, specially in hot variable (HV) where safety margins need to be larger to maintain high fitness.

In general Enterobacteriales (much better at eating glucose) follow more a hotter is better hypothesis, whereas Pseudomonas vary in their thermal breath more than each thermal limit separated.

Overall what we observed is very little variation in upper thermal limits suggesting constraints and some correlations between thermal traits that depended on the taxa.

However, there was no clear sign of local adaptation. Local environmental conditions explained 5% or less on the variation in thermal traits (pc1, pc2). Instead the temperature we used to isolate our bacteria mattered a little more for the lower thermal limit (CTmin).

Within our samples, he found conservation at the level of family/order in maximum growth in glucose (as it has been previously found by others) and in upper thermal limit (CTmax). The optimal temperature of growth was only conserved at the genus level.

I am a little behind in sharing the newest pre-prints from the lab. First, Ariel Favier (an incredible graduate student) sampled bacteria (Gammaproteobacteria) all over California to evaluate if there was signs of local adaptation to temperature: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Total annual budget for NIGMS: 3.2 billion

Total (estimated) daily cost for war in Iran beyond the inestimable cost in human lives and suffering (and gasoline prices if that’s what you care more about, like many do): 900 million dollars (www.cnn.com/2026/03/06/p...)

What are your favorite examples of successful ecological and/or evolutionary forecasting/prediction?

This is a very beautiful paper from the dissertation of @daniireyes.bsky.social in @ayari.bsky.social lab on how species interactions matter for antibiotic resistance.

I do this, but start with the easy haploid asexual case (p+q) and then expand and ask them to imagine expectation for a species with 4 parents (for example)- I find that this helps them get at the mathematical/biological intuition and not just memorize a formula and when it does not work.

Incorporating realistic ecological interactions changes our understanding of which traits are optimal in different environments, including the temperature-size rule.

Awesome paper by David Anderson, outstanding former postdoc with me and Mary O'Connor.

So excited to share this work led by @alexrob.bsky.social with Ben Kerr!

We investigated a poliovirus capsid inhibitor that exploits a breakdown in the genotype-phenotype map to prevent drug resistance evolution. Or does it?

See Alex's thread, but a few extras:

#socialviruses #evosky #virosky 🧪

Psilocybin triggers an activity-dependent rewiring of large-scale cortical networks Psilocybin reshapes brain networks through activity-dependent plasticity, including a weakening of recurrent cortical loops that could underlie its therapeutic effects.

Ok, this is really cool! Using a modified rabies virus, scientists were able to identify where rewiring of the brain happens on psilocybin. 🍄🦠🧠 www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

The fitness costs of reproductive specialization scale inversely with organismal size The evolution of reproductive specialization represents a fundamental innovation in multicellular life, yet the conditions favoring its evolution remain poorly understood. Here, we develop a populatio...

1/28 New preprint up, which I think is the best theoretical idea I've ever had. We asked a simple question: what are the costs of investment into non-reproductive somatic cells? Turns out these costs decrease with the *logarithm* of organism size!

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...